16 Kickstarter projects that could destroy civilization

Sure, these projects seem quirky now, but that scrappy amateur fusion reactor might blow up the Earth. Fund at your own risk.

Courtesy of Kickstarter.com

1.The space elevatorThis project has been in the news all day, a 2km space elevator designed to hover over the moon first, and then eventually earth. The founders sound legit, but isn’t this the sort of thing you might want to let NASA handle? If my cousin’s modern dance documentary falls through, it’s not such a big deal, but this is an enormous chunk of metal that could come plummeting out of the sky at any moment. Seems risky.

Courtesy of Kickstarter.com

2. The homemade fusion reactorThis is a classic bad idea, making headlines when the Brooklyn-based reactor received funding back in 2010. That the borough has not since been consumed by fire, I put down to pure luck.

3. The Small Hadron Collider
Sure, it’s less powerful than the Large Hadron Collider. In fact, it seems to be some kind of effects pedal and its connection to molecular physics is vague at best. Still, we feel as if they’re meddling in forces they do not understand.

Courtesy of Kickstarter.com

4. An enormous robot spiderBond villains use Kickstarter too.

Courtesy of Kickstarter.com

5. Wrathful gods and spirits of TibetThis documentary project wants to travel to Tibet to study the “wrathful gods and spirits” of Himalayan Buddhism. Does that sound like the kind of thing that could, I don’t know, unleash an ancient and unspeakable evil? You can’t be too careful.

Courtesy of Kickstarter.com

6. Mech warfare
I know, Battlebots are a thing, but it still seems unwise to build humanoid robots that specialize in hand-to-hand combat.

Courtesy of Kickstarter.com

7. The Arduino satellite
It’s just like a regular satellite, except it was designed over the Internet by volunteers with no obvious telecommunications experience.

Courtesy of Kickstarter.com

8. Cards Against Humanity
A card game with the goal of destroying humanity. It’s all in the name.

Courtesy of Kickstarter.com

9. The 500,000-volt Tesla coil
Suspiciously similar to something you might build in “Command & Conquer.”

Courtesy of Kickstarter.com

10. The Z-Day manual
I take the zombie apocalypse very seriously, but I also think that by obsessively preparing for it, we may actually be weakening society in the event that it comes to pass. Everyone who buys this manual is going to go survivalist as soon as possible. It’ll be all bikers and no flyboys! It’s a bigger problem than people realize.

12. DittoBlox modular building pods
I don’t know what this is, but I don’t trust it.

Courtesy of Kickstarter.com

13. The Hermes spacecraft
Launch day for the world’s first kickstarted rocket is going to be extremely nervous for everyone involved.

Courtesy of Kickstarter.com

14. The Soundlazer
A death ray made of pure sound? Continue, I’m intrigued.

Courtesy of Kickstarter.com

15. Hexy the Hexapod
“Hexy had only a vague sense of the forces that brought him into being, a shadowy network of ‘backers’ who seemed to respond to his existence with both horror and delight. Were there others like him somewhere? Was there a world in which hexapods lived as something more than an abomination? Whatever his future held, Hexy knew he could not rest until the monsters that created him had answered for their crimes.”

Courtesy of Kickstarter.com

16. Troller 1DHave you seen the movieScreamers? They’re kickstarting screamers.